origins, in red.
To Maria (1942-2019)
I
Red calls me, lulling, like a siren to the rocks.
Red, how I need you! Red sun, red dawn, red day of revelations!
Strange, now, to think of you, sans laughter, sans oxygen tank,
sans childhood fear of the monster under the stairs.
Tell me, what was it, in the red red vines of that house you grew up in?
What did Isabella find that made her come back to this place, to the rain and the accented cursing and the streets where poets’ gun-shots echo in red?
Tell me, what made you into this?
Strange, to think of you, and see a girl my own age, terrified, alone, and dead
long before her children were borne, splinted and painted red onto the altar,
Lips red, cheeks red, alien flag red-yellow-black enveloping you.
Coffee on the shirts, scalding, a birthmark on our reputation, red, too.
You were dead long before Maman was born and yet
here you are, alive and here I am,
alive too and more than you ever were.
the scars from your youth left rot in our foundations,
left imprints in the sand in Knokke and on your bedside table-
I don’t know you.
You of the photographs, a smiling girl who was always old and who looks like me.
I have your eyes, your hair, your wrinkles on my teenage skin and your spirit
and my reflection disgusts me, because I am just like you.
And the immensity of my red, red heart terrifies me.
Red, colour of the cards, the Delaware sun at dawn, a home I never owned.
Red, the siren that calls and lulls to rage!
Red, the rampant lion!
Red, how I need you!
Nothing I have is my own, Red, it’s all you. It’s all you. It’s all you and I am left
here to tell myself that I am my own person, though I see your eyes
when I look at myself, and I cannot look away.
I have to believe that I am different.
Through Bogotá, through the streets and olive-coloured voices and the clamour of the colours, past the teaching-school, the dreams of medicine left to ferment in the dark:
Asklepios thunderstruck, dead!
Through the war and past the memories of a father
who forgot to pay the return fee, left to fend for yourself in a cold white country.
Maria! Maria, Your name is red!
Maria became Marie
and suddenly the story fades away.
II
Your hand on my shoulder, telling me never to trust.
Your marriage, your meds, your mother, your daughter.
She, too, had a changeling child. This I can finally tell you.
There are comets to mark the madman’s genius, but
what words do we save for the dolls who grow up
Struck down, silenced, dressed up and painted to life again?
For those who grow without light, grasping
desperately for the sun in any direction?
For you!
You, whom I watched falter, and fade, and hack up through jokes;
you of the paragliding, adventuring jungle spirit, the Scout in the Amazon,
of the hour-long trips for ice cream and five (-no, four-) children,
all tempered like you.
You, of tantrums and beatings and accusations, of Communism, screaming out
your grief for a lost future in Colombia,
for the fourteen-year-old girl who died and kept walking,
for the sixty-seven-year-old with three months to live,
treading on six years later, too tired to go, still seeing red.
O Maria! Daughter of the sunken ships!
Maria! Crownless Queen of Hearts!
Maria! Heartless: lost her crown!
Maria the Red, Maria, Maria!
Maria, the colour of middle-C, singing, shrieking in cigarette tones:
Maria!
Forgive me! Forgive me!
Forgive my tongue thick with curses and my eyes dry as sand
I speak ill of the dead and cannot speak to the living.
Maria, I cannot save your daughter, or your son, a poet, too.
Them, in their photographs, eighties colours and eighties sound,
Bibles and blocky sweaters and John Travolta.
Them, with white-passing grins and their grandmother’s good name,
dressed up for Communion in cobweb white and gold,
draped to the bones in mailbox ash.
With car crashes and Knokke beach,
Kerouac and the killing squads,
With clamour,
the crying of the seagulls at the Revelations,
Gabriel’s trumpet on a red red red horizon.
With Communist party posters and Che’s face on Jesus,
With fire in the garden and fire in the stove, promised to save us,
Promised in red!
III
Red, how I hate you now.
Red, middle-C, I know that your meaning is not your fault.
Memory, you will watch over me, and I will betray you again and again
Because I was not born to war like you.
I was not born in a castle, in the callour of a silver spoon, in the shadow of grief.
I was not born in red,
I was loved, and taught to use my voice, taught that red is the refuge of the weak,
because I was born to a mother with scars in red, like yours.
Red, you teach me that I am made of liquid iron.
Red, you are unwholesome, unbroken, the colour of the rising sun.
Red, you are Maria, bitter tears and wandering.
There is unfinished business that you have on Earth;
there is a quarrel that you hold with the world.
The fight that you carry with you is your own,
and I will remember it,
but I cannot carry it with me.
I will not be red.